The GDP growth aspirations and expectations of the world population are in collision with peak oil’ and man accelerated global warming. These events have resulted from a century of fossil-fuelled greenhouse gas emissions, largely caused by consumption of coal/oil/gas. Sustainable energy is between a rock and a hard place. This impasse is the catalyst to create sustainable, renewable energy fuels from the most abundant free sources, sun, wind, moon, water, earth's plasma. It is desirable to control the harvest, storage and delivery of this abundant/natural/free energy at a relatively low cost per MW in the face of unsustainable fossil-fuelled energy.
Coal, oil and gas fired power stations have historically provided commercial & domestic base load energy from mining earth's fossil reserves. Crude oil/gas products have fuelled the transport industry through the ICE plant (internal combustion engine) which is a highly matured/sophisticated device but low in efficiency, in the order of 20%. World distribution infrastructures of fossil fuel are widespread.